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Comments (7 of 7)

They can't afford disablitiy costs,yet the politicians making those tough decisions (lol) can afford to keep their extra expenses, lavish pensions, without having them cut.....And didn't DARE touch their 100,000+ salaries,in fact they put in a rule whereby people earing 100,000+ don't have thier salaries affected,that includes those in the dail obviously.

This country if it is to get back on its feet can do with cutting those on higher 100,000 + wages,cutting someone on welfare hardly is going to bring in the big bucks..

Minister Reilly is portrayed in this cartoon in such a way that prompts to mind the potential of him going forward falling into a number of the categories highlighted for people who have the visible disabilities. Obesity is supposed to be the curse and plight of the Western world with its links to diabetes, to heart disease and other other costly health conditions. Luckily for Minister Reilly being a doctor that his private health care should cover him, add to this his investments, his Dail salary, expenses and pensions (include the lucrative IMO negotiated pensions for doctors in public practice) and then his property investments.

What the cartoon forgets is those of us with the bottom of the tier disabilities - the silenced conditions where people can appear normal to look at but the wiring to the brain is off kilter. I am talking about people with brain injury, victims of stroke, people with mental illhess and worst of all those with alzheimers and pre front lobe brain damage. Vision of Change is a decade being promoted, only to be basically binned....The promises from Minister Kathleen Lynch are hollow and the reality is those people with no voice will be labelled, stigmatised and worse again called Moochers as happens in the USA.

They say about suicide and provision. Again this is hollow. We have scattered organisations set up with the HSE having used the opportunity to divest responsibility into some 630 support groups all vying for potential clientele. I sound harsh. Try searching Indymedia on Mental Health, Suicide, Health, Public Private health provision, Alcoholism. Don't be fooled about the requests of the silenced that have gone unheard for a decade.

Minister Reilly - Shame on you, whose parents were doctors and you too are in medicine. Portrane was your local asylum, how grossly unfair you are to people who are vulnerable to mental Health.

Horizon research in the 1990's was funded by Europe, Trinity College Dublin, Centre for Women Studies, St Patrick's Hospital and FAS. The project was a success but FAS said it was too expensiv to roll out in early 2000. Shame on them. Look at the homeless, talk to them and you will find a lot have been released into the community with no provision for their needs. The latest scandal will be these people in bedsits facing eviction.

Again consider our prisons and people who in another decade might have been in mental hospitals. It is an ageing population and if we note what is happening with the Germans - yes the old people are siphoned out of the country to care homes in mainly lower tier countries where care is cheap, We surely need to be thinking and acting sensibly now.

When people were asked who they would vote for ii an election held tomorrow, when undecided voters are excluded, compared with the last the poll was: Fine Gael, 25 per cent (down six points); Labour, 10 per cent (down two points); Fianna Fáil, 26 per cent (up five points); Sinn Féin, 18 per cent (down two points); Green Party, 1 per cent (down one point); and Independents/Others, 20 per cent (up six points).

The survey was representative sample of 1,000 voters aged 18 and over, in face-to-face interviews in all constituencies.

The margin of error is plus or minus 3 per cent.

The "men in the mohair suits"regularly socialised with cabinet colleagues such as Donogh O'Malley and Brian Lenihan.[

By day he impressed the Dáil. By night he basked in the admiration of a fashionable audience in the Russell Hotel. There, or in Dublin's more expensive restaurants, the company included artists, musicians and entertainers, professionals, builders and business people. His companions, Lenihan and O'Malley, took mischievous delight in entertaining the Russell with tales of the Old Guard. O'Malley in turn entertained the company in Limerick's Brazen Head or Cruise's Hotel with accounts of the crowd in the Russell. On the wings of such tales Haughey's reputation spread.

As Minister for Finance, Haughey on two occasions arranged foreign currency loans for the government which he then arranged to be left on deposit in foreign countries (Germany and the United States), in the local currency - instead of immediately changing the loans to the Irish currency and depositing in the Exchequer - these actions were unconstitutional, because it effectively meant that the Minister for Finance was making a currency speculation against his own currency. When this was challenged by the Comptroller and Auditor General Eugene Francis Suttle, Haughey introduced a law to retrospectively legalise his actions. The debate was very short and the record shows no understanding of the issue by the opposition finance spokesmen, O'Higgins for Fine Gael and Tully for Labour. The legislation was passed on 26 November 1969.

One of his first functions as Taoiseach was a televised address to the nation – only the third such address in the Republic's history – in which he outlined the bleak economic picture:
“ I wish to talk to you this evening about the state of the nation's affairs and the picture I have to paint is not, unfortunately, a very cheerful one. The figures which are just now becoming available to us show one thing very clearly. As a community we are living away beyond our means. I don't mean that everyone in the community is living too well, clearly many are not and have barely enough to get by, but taking us all together we have been living at a rate which is simply not justified by the amount of goods and services we are producing. To make up the difference we have been borrowing enormous amounts of money, borrowing at a rate which just cannot continue. A few simple figures will make this very clear...we will just have to re-organise government spending so that we can only undertake those things we can afford... ”
—Charles Haughey, 9 January 1980

You say 'don't do drugs' and yet it is the not the message do not do 'illegal drugs'.

You capture that ideal world that it is so hard for us mere mortals to achieve. However maybe the time is now with us to take a look at what matters to human beings and what sense of humanity, morality, ethics we have attained from the economic war chaos we are now part of.

To kind of anchor your message into thought and the mindset of people, we could correlate to the 10 commandments or maybe more so those Seven Deadly Sins.....If you mean give up prescribed medications, I would suggest be advised, check out price, the morals of Pharma but don't be foolish and obliterate medication and opt for living in a pole dagga hut scenario in the wilds of Mali and hope you can survive if you meningits, appendix, malaria, or any disease that causes death or for that matter improves the quality of life and the health of a person, child or animal for that matter.

The time is to take the good with the bad and move forward with a sense of courage. We need to examine what we have gained and what has cost us dearly.

Given that the prior reference was to silent illnesses like mental health. I sincerely hope your are not suggesting that people stop taking medications particularly when they are prescribed by a Psychiatrist with a firm diagnosis made. There is too much interference by people out there who pretend they grasp mental health and conditions like bipolar. They judge, they make ardent suggestions but let me assure you for the person with bipolar when a so called 'episode' occurs, these are the people who run for the hills leaving it in the hands of the mental health professionals to control the mania or treat the depression. This is real disability that stacks people at the lowest rung of the ladder of vulnerability because even the Department of Health steals what is their entitlement for community health provision and hospitalisation for other areas where people can scream louder.

People forget that Ireland used to house over 20,000 people in those stark Victorian mental hospitals throughout the Republic. Some of these properties and lands were fiancial assets that were sold in the Tiger days for vast sums of money with the promise that Ireland would provide a proper community care service to provide for the people who were released (I say released because they were prisoners to a regime called mental health asylums...'behind the walls'. £35,000m was earmarked for last year but those quangos like the Mental Health Commission who lounge around D4 failed dismally to ensure the payment did not even get paid in the year it was supposed to be used. However, we are supposed to have it included with this year's £35m allocation. Watch this space.

People with disabilities, and particularly those in the neuro-psychiatric spectrum, in times of hardship are extremely vulnerable categories to be placed in. People who once had time, now have their own problems and exclusion and isolation occurs. Today, the march by the Unions is fighting Austerity but that subset called mental health is near oblivion even though experience will tell you that this recession, the loss of jobs, the reduction in salaries, are all precipitating factors towards an onset of mental illness.

So beware about medications. If you are depressed. Go to a doctor. Your mental health is your wealth. Without it in Ireland, there is stigma, there is isolation, there is suicide, there is a grossly inadequate public health system with no-one really fighting for those who need the public health system to provide for them. Take a look at Baggot Street Hospital Community non health services, Dublin 4, for example. Desperation on a Saturday night is phoning the Samaritans, I would suggest.